Gentoo Notes | bitpost.com/news

MythTV video hangs at “Please wait…”: SOLVED

I have been fighting with MythTV, trying to get it to play my videos for over a month. I have played with my MythTV compilation settings, tried turning off OpenGL, changing the video profile to “Slim”, recompiling my ATI video drivers, and messing with my X configuration. I finally solved it by deleting the installation and reinstalling:

su -
rm /usr/lib64/libmyth*
rm /usr/bin/myth*
(reinstall mythtv)

This messy post brought to you by the iPhone’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking app thank you very much…

Comments | Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Gentoo daily pain: samba

Gentoo has been messing with samba packages (again). I guess we are supposed to use just samba now, no more samba-server, samba-client, mount-cifs, blah blah blah. OK, fine. I switched over one machine and everything fell apart. Why? Apparently when you remove mount-cifs (which properly blocks the samba upgrade), YOUR SAMBA USERS GET WIPED OUT. Fun stuff. Best part is, if you browse to your samba shares your machine will totally hang! Seriously! How often do you get to see that in linux? Readd them and you’ll be good to go… hope you don’t have a lot of them!

su -
smbpasswd -a yourusername

I’m starting to see a fork in the road of my life: accept this level of noise (a given in any open source environment) and deal with it (mostly like through use of several machines, one poor bastard that is updated regularly, and others that get updated when things look good); or give up and switch to a different environment (what though? nothing better exists..)…

Comments | Monday, May 10, 2010

Gentoo lost my dvd drive

From udev post-install notes in elogviewer:

If after the udev update removable devices or CD/DVD drives stop working, 
try re-emerging HAL before filling a bug report

Done. No luck. From HAL post-install notes in elogviewer:

If you have problems discovering/configuring hardware, 
try adding yourself to plugdev.

OK…

gpasswd -a m plugdev
reboot

Whew, aifol.

Comments | Saturday, May 1, 2010

Today’s gentoo blues: xorg needs recompile after adding evdev

I’ve discussed hal and dbus and how to get xorg going with them before. Today’s problem: the desktop machine needed [INPUT_DEVICES=”evdev”] in make.conf, and after adding it, you have to recompile xorg-server. Until I did that, I had the straightjacket joy of no-keyboard-mouse-response. The devil is always in the details.

Comments | Sunday, April 25, 2010

Today’s gentoo blues: xorg-server 1.7 is stable, but ati-drivers doesn’t work with it yet

What a crock of poo. So you have to mask all this:

>=x11-libs/libdmx-1.1.0
>=x11-proto/dmxproto-2.3
>=x11-apps/xinput-1.5.0
>=x11-base/xorg-drivers-1.7
>=x11-base/xorg-server-1.7.1
>=x11-libs/libX11-1.3.2
>=x11-libs/libXScrnSaver-1.2.0
>=x11-libs/libXext-1.1.1
>=x11-libs/libXi-1.3
>=x11-libs/libXinerama-1.1
>=x11-libs/libXtst-1.1.0
>=x11-libs/libXxf86dga-1.1.1
>=x11-libs/libXxf86vm-1.1.0
>=x11-proto/bigreqsproto-1.1.0
>=x11-proto/fixesproto-4.1.1
>=x11-proto/inputproto-2.0
>=x11-proto/recordproto-1.14
>=x11-proto/scrnsaverproto-1.2.0
>=x11-proto/xcmiscproto-1.2.0
>=x11-proto/xextproto-7.1.1
>=x11-proto/xf86bigfontproto-1.2.0
>=x11-proto/xf86dgaproto-2.1
>=x11-proto/xf86driproto-2.1.0
>=x11-proto/xf86vidmodeproto-2.3
>=x11-proto/xineramaproto-1.2

Sadly, related bugs and other dev posts often blame users, as if using ati-drivers was some kind of special situation. Gentoo I love you but give your users some love…

And in the “good news” column, the xbmc package is now working on 64-bit AMD! Whee! Yay gentoo!